STAGE: Six by Tenn

The 6 shorts include The Municipal Abattoir, Mr. Paradise, Hello From Bertha, The Fat Man’s Wife, The Pink Bedroom, and Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen…

Until recently four of these plays (The Municipal Abattoir, Mr. Paradise, The Fat Man’s Wife, and The Pink Bedroom), were never-before-published. Written decades ago, only within the past 10 years have they made their debut in production.

Around 1950 Tennessee Williams wrote to Elia Kazan, “I don’t write with the effervescence that I used to. It comes harder. The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays, some of which are like fire-crackers in a rope. Some of that came from sexual repression and loneliness which don’t exist anymore for very good reasons, and some of it came from plain youth and freshness.”